Vietnam Vets Protest Jane Fonda's Broadway Role
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}It's been decades, but Jane Fonda still can't shake her "Hanoi Jane" image from the Vietnam War.
About a dozen Vietnam veterans and other protesters on Saturday picketed the theater where the 71-year-old actress is starring in the Broadway play "33 Variations," telling passers-by that she had once visited their communist enemy in Hanoi.
"Jane Fonda is a traitor," said Dan Maloney of the Gathering of Eagles, which bills itself as a national, nonpartisan veterans group. "She got on Hanoi radio and called every U.S. serviceman a war criminal."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Fonda was tagged with the sobriquet "Hanoi Jane" after visiting the North Vietnamese capital in 1972, where she made radio broadcasts critical of U.S. policy and sat on an anti-aircraft gun laughing and clapping, as she describes in her autobiography, "My Life So Far."
Though she still defends her anti-war activism, Fonda has acknowledged that the incident was "a betrayal" of American forces.
"That two-minute lapse of sanity will haunt me until the day I die," she wrote.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Fonda currently plays a musicologist in the Moises Kaufman play about reconciliation, set against the woman's obsession with Beethoven's 33 variations on a waltz. It marks her return to Broadway after 46 years.